Batman can't beat this new time travel comic about killing Columbus

Right now I’m reading the official synopsis of earth diverI sat up and started listening.

In the climate apocalypse of 2112, a group of “expelled indigenous survivors […] figured out where the world took a sharp turn for the worst: America” and hatched a plan to “send one of them on a bloody, one-sided mission back to 1492 to kill Christopher Columbus before he reaches the so-called New World.” .” That’s what we call a good hook, true shot, and follower by the name of the series’ first arc: “Book One: Kill Columbus.”

Author Stephen Graham Jones (The only good Indians, My heart is a chainsaw) and artist Davide Gianfelice (Daredevil reborn, northerners) a first issue has been published that makes up for the hype. With such a concept earth diver could easily become a grindhouse affair, but Jones and Gianfelice create something more layered that is already full of character and emotion, despite the heavy burden of packing an entire universe, storyline and action into just a 36-page first edition.

(Just look at the Rafael Albuquerque cover, too! A single image that condenses everything the story is about into a single image: a hero, Columbus, death and the treacherous seas of American history. Unbelievable. )

I will take care earth diver with great interest.

What else is happening on the pages of our favorite comics? We’ll tell you. Welcome to Monday Funnies, Polygon’s weekly list of books our comics editor has enjoyed over the past week. It’s part society pages about the lives of superheroes, part recommended reading, and part look at this cool art. There may be some spoilers. There may not be enough context. But there will be great comics. (And if you missed the last issue, read this.)

A sailor berates Tad for knowing how to navigate but not how to tie a knot or fold a sail, as Tad muses: “I can do declinations all day, I can build a morphology tree with my eyes closed, and I can transcribe phonetically using the IPA, British and American

I think my favorite – and most telling – detail of earth diver Number 1 is that our group of young time stealing assassins can only send one person back and they choose our hero Tad. And that’s not because he knows anything about violence or upgrading a ship – it’s because his ability to speak eight different languages is more valuable to a time travel mission than anything else.

The Eternal Phastos speaks to the machine while uncovering its unexpectedly mundane circuit breaker.

Pour one out for the machine, the best new Marvel Comics character in years; the sarcastic, loving, and strangely innocent artificial intelligence of the Celestials that is Earth itself. Writer Kieron Gillen debuted in The Machine as an unreliable narrator by himself and artist Esad Ribić eternal, and (in a metaphor for making a successful Eternals book) something so cheesy and serious should never have worked, but it did. I am very sad to see the machine being hard rebooted into its robotic former self.

The team behind X Men Red I just can’t stop dropping mics on every single issue, and you’d think it would get boring — but then writer Al Ewing and artist Madibek Musabekov drop this panel from Storm, in which she plays the role of the late Magneto take on the mutant politics while fashioning themselves in a re-creation of his Helm with their own clouds. I hope X Men Red goes on forever.

Slam Bradley, his character a black silhouette in a gray trench coat and fedora, walks down the ornate path away from the glowing lights of Wayne Manor. Rain falls in dirty streaks in Gotham City: Year One #1 (2022).

Speaking of art, that one is workingArtist Phil Hester on writer Tom King’s pure, unbiased noir detective yarn, Gotham City: The First Year. Slam Bradley, a relic of detective comics‘ fist-throwing detective fiction, must navigate a world of high society and deadly crime to solve a Gotham City-style Lindbergh kidnapping: toddler Helen Wayne (Batman’s aunt, if you count) kidnapped from her stately home.

Seth is a spear-wielding lizard warrior in primary armor with flowing hair, despite being a lizardman. “I have fond memories of my time in Kahaka, that's all,” he says to an elder.

I feel like I’ve seen a lot Soa new series written and drawn by Deadly class‘ Wes Craig before the first issue hit shelves, with several pages in Image Comics’ anniversary anthology. So I knew it was a story about a warrior sister with a technomagic arm escorting her scholar brother across a fantasy wasteland to find his destiny, but I Not know there was a hot lizard boy with flowing blonde hair named Seth who is unrequitedly in love with her, and I love that.

Another thing I love? How obvious it is that the people are behind it Sword of AzraelWriter Dan Watters and artist Nikola Čižmešija watched Neon Genesis Evangelion. It’s about time someone DC’s best recovery, brainwashed by their father to become assassins for an even more secretive and evil sect of the Templars, brought an anime/manga sensibility. these rules.

Hijinks occur between Miracleman-themed Krazy Kat characters in a parody called Kimota Kat in Miracleman #0 (2022).

Who wore it better: miracle man‘s parody of a highly influential strip comic crazy cator…

A spider character protects himself from rocks thrown by the spiders he has caught in his web in a parody of Krazy Kat named Syllie Spider in Edge of Spider-Verse #5 (2022).

…Edge of Spider verseis parody? It’s very funny to me that these two comics came out in two different anthology issues by the same company in the same week.